Computer applications such as messaging and scheduling applications have become important applications in many computer users' lives. Messaging programs generally allow a user to send and receive electronic mail (e.g., messages) to and from other computer users, for example, over a local- or a wide-area network, or over an intranet, extranet, or the Internet. Scheduling programs generally allow a user to track appointments in a calendar. More sophisticated scheduling programs allow one user to schedule a group meeting with other computer users—checking the latter users' schedule availability, and receiving confirmation from the users upon them accepting or rejecting the group meeting appointment.
Within the prior art, however, messaging and scheduling programs are generally not very well integrated, even if they are components within the same computer program. For example, a user may receive a message from a colleague stating “Looking forward to seeing you at 2 p.m. on Thursday.” Generally, however, the prior art does not provide for automatically directing the scheduling program to make a meeting appointment at 2 p.m. on Thursday. Instead, typically the user who has received the message has to open the scheduling program, access Thursday's calendar, and manually enter an appointment at 2 p.m. on Thursday's calendar. Because of the many steps required to go from reading the message within the messaging program to entering the information into the scheduling program, many users choose not to even use scheduling programs, or to only use them sparingly.
In another regard, people exploit a variety of cognitive facilities to make sense of the world. Over the last century, cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that both sequential and parallel processing capabilities are employed in analyzing, learning, and understanding sensory information and conceptual relationships. A variety of findings have focused on the limited abilities of people to integrate, remember, process and understand numerous objects, concepts, and relationships.
One of the promises of modern computing has been to develop and leverage new graphics rendering technologies to enhance the understanding of complex relationships via visualization. Visualization of complex relationships can provide significant utility in education, for example, allowing students to push toward the limits of their understanding, and to bolster the abilities of both information workers and more typical consumers of personal computing, thus facilitating more complex tasks with new found efficiency.
To date, some researchers have leveraged prior results and new work in cognitive psychology in a variety of ways to enhance visualization of and navigation in complex information spaces. However, most work in the creation of graphical visualizations or other automated applications has remained in the realm of handcrafted design by experts.